I'm running firefox in docker right now using subuser[1]. [1] http://subuser.org
Wasn't aware anyone had done this with docker. Going to give this a try. It would be a nice way of running some software.
Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#52I recently 'Docker-ized' http://greptweet.com with https://github.com/kaihendry/greptweet/blob/master/Dockerfil...
The main thing I really like is that Dockerfile. So if Greptweet needs to move, it's a `docker build .` to setup everything on a CoreOS VPS.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
What value does Docker add if you are already running a VM? Are the laptops Linux, so Docker provides a lighter alternative to a full vm environment?
The laptops are Macbook airs and were not running a VM at all. Instead, users had a script they could double click to launch the application in a terminal window. Now the laptops run the VirtualBox setup and always have the application running in the background. Docker adds value by letting us distribute a much smaller amount of data vs sending out an entire VM image. For the Windows server, we used to distribute upg…
I'm curious about a couple of things:
- Are you/have you tried using "FROM" and layering things in multiple images to reduce what you need to keep shipping?
- Anything stopping you from using a private registry? I'm running one at it seems to work quite well (with the caveat that it's annoying to have to specify the registry all the time).
- You talk about "shuffling the data". Does that mean you're not using volumes to keep the data separate from the container? If so, any particular reason?
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#54At UltimateFanLive we use docker on Elastic Beanstalk to speed up the scaling process. Our load goes from 0 to 60 in minutes, as we are connected with live sports data. Packages like numpy and lxml take way too long to install with yum and pip alone. So we pre-build images with the dependencies but we are still using the rest of the goodies on Elastic Beanstalk. Deploy times have plummeted and we keep t2 cpu credits.
FYI, the download link has an unknown character before it. Win 7, Chrome 37.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#55We're using docker in part to get round the old 'works on my machine' problem: http://www.rainbird.ai/2014/08/works-machine/
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#56Docker revolutionized our server deployment. My company has 50 nodejs services deployed on VPS providers around the world. It allows us to completely automate the deployment of these servers regardless of the provider's APIs. When we roll out updates, we never patch a running box, we just bring the new container up and remove the old one. Super easy, super reliable, and best of all, totally scriptable.
We also have a pretty sophisticated testing environment using Docker which creates a simulation of our server in on any developer's laptop. It's really remarkable actually.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#57Good question. I have learnt enough about Docker to know it's not something which solves any problem I have, but finding out concrete facts about what others are actually doing with it was one of the hardest parts of the learning process. The official Use Cases page is so heavily laden with meaningless buzzwords and so thin on actual detail that I still feel dirty just from reading it. https://docker.com/resources/us…
So what problems are you trying to solve?
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#58We're moving all of production in EC2 from an old CentOS 5 image managed by capistrano to CoreOS, with fleet deploying images built by the docker.io build service and private repo. I love it.
Every week, we rebuild our base image starting with the latest debian:stable image, apply updates, and then our apps are built off of the latest base image. So distro security updates are automatically included with our next deploy.
We had been deploying multiple apps to the same EC2 instances. Having each app's dependencies be separate from other apps has made upgrading them easier already.
This also means all containers are ephemeral and are guaranteed to be exactly the same, which is a pretty big change from our use of capistrano in practice. I'm hoping this saves us a lot of debugging hassle.
Instead of using ELBs internally, I'm using registrator to register the dynamic ports of all of my running services across the cluster in etcd, with confd creating a new template for NginX and updating it within 5 seconds if a service comes up or drops out. Apps only need to talk to their local NginX (running everywhere) to find a load-balanced pool of whichever service they are looking for. NginX is better than ELB at logging and retrying failed requests, to provide a better user-experience during things like deploys.
Some of these things could be solved by spinning up more EC2 instances. However that usually takes minutes, where docker containers take seconds, which changes the experience dramatically.
And I'm actually reducing my spend by being able to consolidate more. I can say things like "I want one instance of this unit running somewhere in the cluster" rather than having a standalone EC2 instance for it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#59Here's the problems we're solving with Docker: * Sanity in our environments. We know exactly what goes into each and every environment, which are specialized based on the one-app-per-container principle. No more asking "why does software X build/execute on machine A and not machines B-C?" * Declarative deployments. Using Docker, Core OS, and fleet[1], this is the closest solution I've found to the dream of specifying…
Very interesting. I'm curious, have you considered nixos?
Yes, very much so. In fact, our goal is to have NixOS based containers. Right now, we're using Debian as the base image, and there's /no/ guarantee that the versions of software installed are consistent (since Docker caches based on the line in a Dockerfile, rather than what's actually installed).
With Nix, we can have version guarantees in all of our Docker images--including the cached images.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#60Good question. I have learnt enough about Docker to know it's not something which solves any problem I have, but finding out concrete facts about what others are actually doing with it was one of the hardest parts of the learning process. The official Use Cases page is so heavily laden with meaningless buzzwords and so thin on actual detail that I still feel dirty just from reading it. https://docker.com/resources/us…
I asked the same question a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324138 Some of the answers are interesting. I agree with you that most of the companies they mention on their page are so big that it makes you think that Docker is a thing for big companies, and not relevant to what I do.
For my part, I use Docker for my personal home server to keep dependencies documented and keep everything cleanly isolated.
Currently I have 8 images running, and more sitting around that I spin up as needed, running everything from a minecraft server, to AROS (an AmigaOS re-implementation) , haproxy, a dev-instance of my blog, a personal wiki, my dev environment (that I use to run screen and ssh into for when I want to edit stuff - it bind mounds a shared home directory, but means I don't mess up to host server with all kinds of packages I decide to install).
It's gotten to the point where the moment I find myself typing "apt-get install" I pause to consider whether I should just put it in a Dockerfile instead. After all, if this is a package I'll need once, for a single program, the Dockerfile does not take much longer to write, and it saves on the clutter.
I have a draft blog post about how I'm using it I keep meaning to post - probably after the weekend.